Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 16th Aug 2008 16:50 UTC
This is the eighth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms [part I | part II | part III | part IV | part V | part VI | part VII]. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part VIII, we focus on the tab.
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Member since:
2006-10-08
Because I'm not using any "Windows", I can't confirm this. Regarding different applications that use tabbing on UNIX, Ctrl+Tab (performing the same kind of operation locally that Alt+Tab does globally) behaved differently in Opera (brings up tab selector) and Firefox (switches tabs) and GNotepad+ (does nothing).
It's not that I am a consistency guy - in fact, it doesn't matter to me at all because I'm using applications through all imaginable toolkits -, but that's something I just noticed. Of course, keyboard behaviour isn't important when you're only using the mouse.
Furthermore, the corresponding menu items are often missing. While windowing applications had something like a menu "windows" containing "next" and "previous", associated with shortcut key combinations (I remember Ctrl+PF6 / Ctrl+Shift+PF6 being such shortcuts), today's tabbed applications don't seem to have such "next tab" and "previous tab" menu items inside a "view" or "tabs" menu or submenu.
I do see this in Windowmaker all the time. :-)